By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is “and forgive them their debts”: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year.
Global Warming and U.S. National Security Diplomacy
Control of oil has long been a key aim of U.S. foreign policy. The Paris climate agreements and any other Green programs to reduce the pace of global warming are viewed as threatening the aim of dominating world energy markets by keeping economies dependent on oil under U.S. control. Also blocking U.S. willingness to help stem global warming is the oil industry’s economic and hence political power. Its product is not only energy but also global warming, along with plastic pollution.
This fatal combination of the national security state’s mentality and oil industry lobbying threatens to destroy the planet’s climate. The prospect of raising temperatures and sea levels along the coasts while inland regions suffer drought is viewed simply as collateral damage to the geopolitics of oil. The State Department is reported to have driven out individuals warning about global warming’s negative impact.1
The only attempts to restrict oil imports are the new Cold War trade sanctions to isolate Russia, Iran and Venezuela. The aim is to increase foreign dependence on U.S., British and French oil, giving American strategists the power to make other countries “freeze in the dark” if they follow a path diverging from U.S. diplomatic aims.
It was the drive to control the world’s oil trade – and to keep it dollarized – that led the United States to overthrow the Iranian government in 1953, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to invade Iraq in 2013, and most recently for Donald Trump to isolate Iran while backing Saudi Arabia and its Wahabi foreign legion in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Sixty years earlier, in 1953, the CIA and Britain joined to overthrow Iran’s elected President Mohammad Mosaddegh to prevent him from nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. A similar strategy explains U.S. attempts at regime change in Venezuela and Russia.
While seeking to make other countries dependent on U.S.-controlled oil, America itself has long aimed at energy self-sufficiency for itself. In the 1970s the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) developed the environmentally disastrous plan to promote North American energy independence by tapping Canada’s Athabasca tar sands. About ten gallons of water are needed to make each gallon of synthetic crude oil. This water is treated as a free good, not factored into the cost of extracting syncrude. (I was the lead Hudson Institute economist evaluating ERDA’s plans, and was removed from the study when I protested that this might cause downstream water problems.) A byproduct of American energy self-sufficiency may be to make water scarcer and more expensive, especially as fracking pollutes local water resources while diverting an immense flow of fresh water as part of the extraction-and-pollution symbiosis.
The short-sightedness of America’s aggressive oil diplomacy is causing opposition in Europe as it buckles under unprecedented summer heat waves, just as U.S. cities are being devastated by drought, forest fires, floods and other extreme weather. Yet this has not dented the basic thrust of U.S. foreign policy to control oil.
Oil in the U.S. balance of payments
Control of oil has long been a major contributor to the U.S. trade and payments, and hence of the dollar’s ability to sustain the huge outflow of overseas military spending. In 1965 I conducted a study for the Chase Manhattan Bank and found that in balance-of-payments terms, every dollar of oil industry investment outflow is recovered in just 18 months. That is because hardly any of the reported import value of oil was paid to foreigners.
To the extent that the United States must import foreign oil, such trade has been limited to U.S. oil majors (on “national security” grounds), mainly from their own foreign branches. Only a small proportion of the price was paid in foreign currency. U.S. companies bought crude oil from their foreign branches at very low prices, and allocated all the price markup to their shipping affiliates in Panama or Liberia, along with shipping and freight costs, dividends and interest, managerial charges and charges for capital investment, depreciation and depletion. Most of what is counted as U.S. foreign investment in oil takes the form of machinery exports, U.S. materials and management, and so did not actually represent a dollar inflow. The effect has been to obtain oil imports at minimal balance-of-payments cost.
Since 1974, Saudi Arabia and neighboring Arab countries have been told that they can charge as high a price as they want for their oil. After all, the higher the price they charge, the higher the profits will be for domestic U.S. oil producers. The “conditionality” is that they must recycle their export earnings into the U.S. financial market. They have to keep their foreign reserves and most personal financial wealth in U.S. Treasury securities, stocks and bonds. A global move away from oil would impair this circular flow of oil-production gains into U.S. financial markets supporting domestic stock prices.
Solar energy technology and other alternatives to oil will not contribute nearly as much to the balance of payments as oil. Not only will environmentally friendly alternatives be outside the ability of U.S. diplomats to control or cut off energy supplies to other countries, but China is taking a leadership position in solar energy technology.
A major factor bolstering the oil industry’s economic power has been its tax-avoiding “flags of convenience” located in offshore banking centers. U.S. oil companies have long registered taken their profits from production, refining and distributing in Panama and Liberia. Over fifty years ago the treasurer of Standard Oil of New Jersey walked me through how the oil industry pretended to make all its profits in the tax havens that had no income tax – paying a low price to oil-producing countries, and charging a high price to downstream refiners and marketers.
One implication of this is that there is little political chance of any cleanup of tax avoidance via offshore banking centers, by Western investors and indeed the world’s criminal class and corrupt politicians, given the fact that oil and mining are the major beneficiaries. Weakening the lobbying power to prevent closing the tax loopholes that permit the fictitious cost-accounting of tax-avoidance centers would weakening the oil industry’s economic power.
U.S. foreign policy is based on making other countries dependent on U.S. oil
U.S. diplomatic strategy is to make other countries dependent on vital materials that U.S. diplomats can use as an economic lever. An early example were the food sanctions imposed in the 1950s to spur resistance to Mao’s revolution in China. Canada broke the grain embargo.
If other countries produce their energy by solar power, wind power or nuclear power, they will be independent of U.S. oil diplomacy and its threats to cut off their energy supplies, grinding their economies to a halt if they don’t endorse U.S. neoliberal economic policies. This explains why the Trump Administration withdrew from the Paris climate agreement to slow global warming.
U.S. Cold War 2.0 policy is aimed at isolating Russia
U.S. energy self-sufficiency finds its counterpart in the demand that Europe become dependent entirely on American “Freedom Gas,” at a much higher price than is available from Russia’s Gazprom and reject the Nordstream 2 pipeline, preventing it from obtaining lower-priced rival gas from Russia.2 The Trump administration argues that to avoid dependency on Russia, Europe should buy its oil and gas at much higher prices from the United States – about 30% higher, in addition to the expense of building LNG ports to transport liquified natural gas by ocean tanker instead of by Russian pipeline. “We’re protecting Germany from Russia and Russia is getting billions and billions of dollars in money from Germany,” Trump complained to reporters at the White House during a meeting with Polish President Andrzej Duda.3
On July 31, 2019 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 20 to 2 to back the “Protecting Europe’s Energy Security Act” sponsored by right-wing Republican Ted Cruz and Blue Dog New Hampshire Democrat Jeanne Shaheen. Companies in Switzerland and Italy were first to be censored.
Global warming and GDP accounting
Warmer air temperature means a higher rate of evaporation, and hence more rain, tornados and flooding, as we are seeing this year. A related result will be drought as glaciers melt and no longer feed the major rivers on which dams have been built to generate electric power. The seeming irony is that these effects of global warming and extreme weather have become bulwarks of the rise in U.S. GDP. The cleanup costs of air and water pollution, the expense of rebuilding flooded or damaged homes, crop destruction, the increased cost of air conditioning, of coping with the spread of injurious insects northward and the rise in medical and health costs may actually account for all its growth since 2008.
Neoliberals celebrated the End of History after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, promising an era of new growth as “the market” became the world’s planner. They did not spell out that much of this growth would take the form of coping with the short-termism of the oil industry and other rent extractors living in the present and taking their money and running.
What factors should a Green Policy emphasize?
As Mark Twain quipped, “Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” In today’s political world, doing something about global warming means taking on a set of goliaths that go beyond the oil and gas industry. It is one thing to say that global warming, climate change and the resulting extreme weather are existential threats to present-day civilization and economies. It is another to spell out the preconditions for solving the problem in the sphere of economic and tax reform, military and U.S. national security policy.
A Green program cannot succeed without confronting the National Security state’s mentality aiming at U.S. oil supremacy. U.S. national security has become a war threatening the security of the entire globe. Threatening to freeze countries in the dark if they do not follow U.S. policy and isolate Iran and Russia, the United States is burning itself up along with the rest of the planet.
Stopping global warming requires a tax policy to close down the special privileges promoting oil industry profits including the use of “flags of convenience” in offshore banking centers as a means of tax avoidance. A Green program logically would include a natural-resource rent tax (as classical economists advocated throughout the 19th century), and charges for what economists call “external economies,” that is social costs that are “externalities” to corporate balance sheet. Companies should become liable to reimburse society for such costs.
Imposing a tax on oil usage would raise the price of gasoline, but would not deter consumption much in the short run because car drivers and public utilities already are locked in to oil-using capital investments. A more effective response would be to reduce the profitability of oil by closing the tax-avoidance loopholes and “flags of convenience” that the industry’s lobbyists have created. “Oil industry accounting” leaves “Hollywood accounting” and Donald-Trump style real-estate accounting in the dust.
The public relations problem with this solution is that this practice of pretending to “earn” all one’s income in small island enclaves with no income tax has become so widespread that it has created an enormous vested interest now including the leading IT giants, industry and real estate. Depriving tax accountants of recourse to such tax-avoidance centers also threatens America’s National Security state by challenging its perceived national interest in attracting the world’s criminal capital to these enclaves as a bulwark of the U.S. balance of payments. The world’s wealthiest corporations and tax evaders are aligned against an economic policy that would most help reduce the carbon footprint by moving beyond oil and gas.
To implement a successful Green policy program, it thus is necessary to move beyond the environmental problem to take on a broad and wealthy array of vested interests. They will cite free-market ideology as justification for taking their money in the short run, without care for the weather disaster they are causing. That makes the task much more daunting, and also may limit the ideological appeal of a real Green program.
In countries such as Iceland and Germany, neoliberal Green Parties tend to be centrist and conservative when it comes to supporting banks and the financial sector, and endorse a market-based bonanza of carbon trading rights to be bought and sold by Wall Street speculators. The problem is that such “market-based” solutions must fail, because markets are short-term and do not take account “externalities.” Are Greens willing to criticize this “market philosophy” and its tunnel vision? Without such a challenge, Green parties will appeal largely to “feel good” voters who want to register their politically correct concern without doing much to actually solve the underlying problem.
We indeed seem to be entering the End Time. It is turning out to be the antithesis of the neoliberal End of History that was being celebrated in 1991 as free market victory after the Soviet Union collapsed. It is a crisis of Western civilization, not its apex.
Notes
1 Rod Schoonover, “My Climate Report Was Quashed,” New York Times op-ed, July 31, 2019, reported that the White House blocked his report on the adverse effects of climate change on the ground that “the scientific foundation of the analysis did not comport with the administration’s position on climate change.”
2 Regarding U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) of Energy Dominance, see Ben Aris, “Busting Nord Stream 2 myths,” Intellinews.com, August 27, 2018. U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry has likened U.S. gas to American soldiers liberating Europe from the Nazis. "The United States is again delivering a form of freedom to the European continent," he told reporters in Brussels earlier this month. "And rather than in the form of young American soldiers, it’s in the form of liquefied natural gas." See also and https://truthout.org/articles/freedom-gas-will-be-used-to-justify-oppression-at-home-and-abroad/.
3 “Euro Slides After Trump Threatens Sanctions To Stop NordStream 2 (Again!),” Zero Hedge, June 12, 2019.
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Fourth paragraph correction: 2003 not 2013. “. . . that led the United States to overthrow the Iranian government in 1953, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to invade Iraq in 2013, . . . . , , , ,
Arthur Wilke
Important correction. Thanks. I really hope someone will make it.
Just for the record:
The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company became BP.
In the ’50 the Oil Giants were nicknamed the Severn Sisters. Conversations I hear or overheard from my childhood reverberate today.
Just to add to your observation: BP (or Anglo-Iranian) lobbied the British government to overthrow the Mossadegh regime because they were threatening to nationalize BP’s oil interests in Iran. They were not going to take them over without compensation. Iran offered the same price per BTU the Brits themselves were paying the coal mine owners to nationalize British coal mines.
For their trouble, the British were expelled from Iran, and Truman refused to help them, but when Eisenhower came into office, he authorized CIA to overthrow Mossadegh and install the Shah. When the Ayatollahs came to power, they found the Shah’s secret police had safe houses with ovens large enough to roast humans, and stacks of severed limbs.
+1 Adam
Cain leveraged
7 sisters
history of cruelty
Yes, although Severn Sisters did have a certain poetic or fanciful historicity given that industrial aspect. :)
Great essay, Prof. Hudson.
I would suspect that there is only a small slice of the general public that understands the connection between oil, the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, US balance-of-payments, and our foreign policy.
It’s depressing for me to notice lately how much of our immediate (20-30 years) post-WWII history has been removed from any kind of of education or wide distribution.
Historical ignorance seems to be one of the successes of neoliberalism. I read a quote earlier today from William Casey to Reagan to the effect that they (CIA) will know when their disinformation campaign is finished when what everyone believes is fake.
And they sure as [family blog] have made a lot of progress lately.
I suspect most of the world intuitively understands the general connection between oil, the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, US balance-of-payments, and US foreign policy, even if the finer historical and economic details elude them.
Sorry, but any discussion that fails to take into account the fact that social, political, and economic frameworks have failed to adapt to a global population that has exploded from just over 2.5 Billion in 1950 to 7.7 Billion today is something that I can’t take seriously. It confuses cause and effect.
It is the “Lilliputians” who are destroying the carrying capacity of our planet. The “Goliaths” are simply finding ways to profit from this, as they always have.
I take your point that population numbers are a definite factor but your framing of the “Lilliputians” as perps is way too simplistic. Here are a few other factors that make that dubious in my opinion:
– the lion’s share of earth’s population contributes much less than the less populous but wealthier developed nations… this is well known.
– women in many countries are not given many options to not have children.
– infrastructure geared towards fossil fuels is something of a trap, even for people who attempt to minimize their own carbon footprint (a point Dr. Hudson makes when he says that carbon taxes wouldn’t change things very quickly).
– lots and lots of us “Lilliputians” have been screaming for most of our lives to industry, government, and those in power that climate change is causing mass extinction and disruption and must be addressed….for all the good it’s done; their answer has been half-measures at best and oppression, obfuscation and doubling down at worst. Without cooperation of the Goliaths, how the hell can it change?!?
“Well known?” Have you seen satellite images of the smoke plume stretching over the Indian Ocean caused by tens of millions of impoverished women cooking over dung fires in the Ganges Delta, where population density exceeds 1000 persons per square mile? Their fossil fuel consumption is infinitesimal, yet it is scientific fact that they are one among the many cohorts who are significant contributors to Climate Change.
We “”Lilliputians” can bind each and every “Goliath” hand and foot, but the Karma of 8 Billion human beings (and counting) will still run over your Dogma…
Well . . . its the Crisis Crisis on display yet again. A Crisis for every taste in Crises, each Crisis cross-making several other Crises worse, and too many Crises to keep up.
We have to attack the problem at both ends, from the middle, and from several other points of attack if we can find any. The High-Consumption world will have to drop its consumption. The High Population world will have to freeze and then gracefully drop its population ( without resorting to Jackpot Measures or succumbing to Jackpot Design Engineering imposed by the Rich World Lords of Policy.)
As to Karma and Dogma . . . there is a one-hand other-hand way to look at this. On the one hand, at a population of 7 billion and counting, NOTHING is sustainable. On the other hand, ” I don’t have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun YOU.”
India’s coal consumption was reported at 452.221 mn TOE in Dec 2018. Maybe not all the fault of impoverished women in the Ganges delta, but insignificant? [TOE – tonne of oil equivalent]
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/india/coal-consumption
The impoverished women are not cooking over coal fires. They are burning dried dung or maybe also sticks and twigs and little pieces of wood. Because that is all they have.
Now, if someone were to make a serious effort to create super-efficient stoves that produced the kind of heat which is compatible with these womens’ cooking methods and needs and recipes . . . . and were as easy to use and maintain as the fire-pits or stoves that these women have now . . . then these women might well adopt those new super-efficient stoves.
Now . . . if a super-efficient-stove engineering-effort were to recruit representatives from these women right at the start to assist in the design of these stoves, such stoves might be even better, and the poverty women might adopt them even faster and more totally.
That would mitigate that particular problem, if anyone reaaaalllly CAAAREZZZ enough to do something like that.
And then of course there is this,
Putin’s Pledge To Ditch The Dollar Is Slowly Becoming A Reality
Sorry, the link seems to be not working. I’ll just copy paste the URL.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-04/putin-s-pledge-to-ditch-the-dollar-is-slowly-becoming-a-reality
Sorry, I missed your comment before posting mine.
Yes, very interesting, I want to know who’s back is against the wall, ours, or theirs?
I’m guessing the USA has finally convinced the rest of the world to revolt?
Watt4Bob
Or, they have at least convinced the rest of the world that they’re revolting.
> Mark Twain quipped, “Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”
Perhaps Charles Dudley Warner?
You are simply excellent at explaining political economics! Thank you Michael Hudson. Your Guns and Butter episodes should be required viewing, and your books required reading in our high schools.
As I have proposed to you before, we need you, and your fellow rockstar economists teaming up with musicians, putting on Econ/ music festivals all over the country. You could have a mix of both live and video conferenced acts to get the big crowds. (I can’t wait to buy a Michael Hudson t-shirt! Should it feature parasites, Babylon,FIRE, or Jesus? Balance of payments could be depicted as a scale with references to all of them. I’ll send you some designs to get you seriously considering the idea.)
Love and Gratitude, Hope
HERE HERE!
To me, the #HUDSONHAWKs message makes the most sense. Plus Doc Hudsons Philosophy is seemless going back thousands of years to Earths first attempts at Civilizations. Our future is a mix of Agrarian/Tech Soviets united around different cultures. Space exploration will be a global communal effort. Drop All Hate. No Barbaroi, All Hoi Polloi!
CANCEL ALL DEBTS.
LIBERATE THE WORKING CLASS!
+1^e
> “Most of what is counted as U.S. foreign investment in oil takes the form of machinery exports, U.S. materials and management, and so did not actually represent a dollar inflow.”
Is there a typo for ‘dollar inflow’ (should be dollar outflow)? The foreign investment is largely captured my US exports (workforce, machinery + materials) and so total capital outflow is diminished.
Right. Dollar OUTFLOW.
Sorry. I’m a bad proofreader
Lol Yuuuup but who has time to proofread when ur starting the Revolution!
#Praxis
The following excerpt is Putin’s Pledge to Ditch the Dollar Is Slowly Becoming a Reality Bloomberg August 3, 2019
I’d be interested to know how important this development is, and can it happen fast enough to force the USA to change its behavior?
Seems to me that the Dollar Bully is pushing Europe closer to the Belt Road project chasing actual ‘Free Trade‘?
Since the US has sanctions on Russia, the decline in the use of the dollar in trade could be significantly due to US companies not importing from Russia as much. US imports from Russia in 2018 were 60% of the level they were at their peak, and they are even lower so far this year than last year. And remember this is in nominal term, so the decline in real terms is greater. And Europeans doing business with Russia and the US would try to avoid the dollar to avoid being caught and sanctioned.
So Putin can try taking credit, but I see this as driven by the behavior of his counterparts. Plus it would be more telling to see on a gross basis how much of the change in currency mix for exports was due simply to a fall in dollar transactions. The change is less meaningful if the fall in dollar use was more or less matched by an increase in the use of other currencies.
No looking good here if you a supporter of a reality based community. With a light touch the US could have kept this game going on throughout the rest of the century but it appears that absolute dominance is now the modus operandi. The problem is that there are no room for allies in such a set up – only vassals – and the stresses and strains of having one country that gets to decide your foreign and economic policy are getting intolerable as mentioned in how countries just cannot trade with each other must must check with the US if they are allowed to do so and what exactly they are allowed to trade.
Olga over in Links came up with a very interesting article (https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/08/03/citadels-america-elites-fractured-and-at-odds-with-each-other/) on how this behaviour is being intensified among America’s elite by their demand for maximum pressure on countries that revolt at this behaviour such as Russia, China, Iran, etc. This Cold War 2.0 is being used to keep up this idea of oil-dependency with America’s hand on the petrol pump. As we shift into a multi-polar world, many of these nations are coalescing in grouping that for their own survival are pushing back against the US and its allies. And so they should.
In a bit of irony, some of the places used to facilitate the hiding of all this tax revenue – Nicholas Shaxson’s Treasure Islands in fact – will eventually succumb to rising sea levels which are due in part to their helping avoid any change in policy in oil and dollar dependency. By then they will have a mini space station in orbit that they will be able to do the same service. In any case we are in for a rough rise so we had better buckle up as there will be intense turbulence ahead and no clear skies. Many thanks to Michael Hudson on this latest piece which helps bring context to what is going on in the world today.
This may be Dr. Hudson’s most important publication since the release of Super Imperialism. I have long suspected there was a link between the US dragging its feet on transitioning to renewable energy sources but laced the ability to document those suspicions. (There may be few people in the world other than Dr. Hudson who can.)
As Hudson makes clear this goes well beyond ‘petrodollars’ and fractional reserve banking, i.e. flags of convenience accounting, etc. The “lords of finance” have been practicing Suicidal Statecraft for a long time. Take a look at these slides if you are still a global warming skeptic: Global Warming, Parts 1 & 2
In addition to being suicidal the Lords of Finance are also astoundingly arrogant. They seem to have believed the ignorant peasants of the developing world would go on forever laboring in locally run sweat shops and accepting their ex nihilo money. The lure of profits (and thinly disguised class warfare) led them to offshore the wealth-creating potential of their respective national populations (Soddy’s “discovery & diligence”) not to mention perhaps the prime ingredient of wealth “natural energy” AKA “freedom gas” for which, as Hudson observes, they are more than willing to poison an ingredient of wealth maybe even more important than Soddy’s “natural energy”.
Question: who was the economist who suggested off-shoring the drudge factory work while retaining employment further up the food chain? China must have read him, maybe even Germany though it looks like Germany may be succumbing to US business practices.
Trump has responded to the inevitable threat of global warming by building a wall–or at least proposing that the wall be built. This shows that they recognize that global warming will inevitably lead to an unprecedented crush of human migration and they want to be able to control who gets to enter our country to share the final cache of resources before the human race becomes extinct.
To enjoy the clean water – ????
1
Willa Kulhavy:
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Sep 2, 2007 @ 9:21 pm
Read more: http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/Oc-Po/Ogallala-Aquifer.html#ixzz5vjpi0LUH
T.Boone Pickens plans to transport water from the Texas panhandle to metropolitan Dallas/FT Worth. Texas has water laws that allow that. He needs to form a water district to construct an 800 mile 8′ diameter pipe. Think that won’t affedt the Ogallala?
…
and currently the Permian Basin activity is the other good investment
Read more: http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/Oc-Po/Ogallala-Aquifer.html#ixzz5vjpalbst
A wall faces both ways.
This wall could well be repurposed to keep Americans in once the DC FedRegime decides to North Koreanize the United States. The Wall could even be secretly intended for that very future purpose.
Glad to see mention of the Russian gas supply to Europe and the stalking horse role played by Poland in opposing it and promoting US supply. I believe the EU is slowly waking up to Poland’s quisling role in opposing the best interests of the people. Didn’t they just cancel the independence of their judiciary? Nice people
Of course the fact that Poland has an LNG import terminal for ships from the US transporting gas was just a coincidence and the money that they stand to make on it just a happy byproduct. Plus the fact that they are banking on even more US gas imports by building a second terminal now using EU funds does not necessarily mean that they are a stalking horse for Trump’s gas products. And there is no truth to the rumour that the Poles want to name this terminal “Port Trump”.
https://www.lngworldnews.com/eu-grants-funds-for-polish-lng-terminal-expansion/
#HUDSON2024
Doc Hudson, in your opinion, whats the best way for the Earths Proletariat to use this information? Can we all unite in a Blitzkrieg like Strike in seizing the levers of power through Electoral Politics?
I feel like if the US Workers controlled our Military and Deep State we could truly spread peace, self determination and a New World Order not based on Profit from Oil.
Excellent article. Could have used another cycle of proofreading. Looks like you used censored instead of censured in one place. Anyway, very informative.
Michael Hudson is a jewel. Unlike any other economist, his knowledge spans economics, politics, banking and taxes for the past 4,000 years! He is without precedent, in my opinion. He easily glides through antiquity, the classics, socialism and Modern Monetary Theory (big supporter). I’m finishing up his book “J is for JUNK economics’; a Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception. New slang word for orthodox economics today: ‘Junkenomics.’
Bush, in his 2006 State of the Union Address, announced his amazing discovery that the US was addicted to oil.
From a Big News show a few months later (only two minutes):
https://youtu.be/sfmRaAKjdRo